


Without a Hitch

by draculard



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Amputation (off-screen), Assault on Hoth, Bacta Tank (Star Wars), Blood and Injury, Established Relationship, General Villainy and Cunning, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prosthesis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29806881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: General Veers wakes up in the snow with a battle raging all around him, blood in his ears, and one foot twisted around to face a direction he would really rather it didn't face.All things told, he'd say the plan to oust Admiral Ozzel is going pretty well.
Relationships: Firmus Piett/Maximilian Veers
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Without a Hitch

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr, I'm draculard there too

First thought, most important thought, sparked by the blurry sight of Imperial snowtroopers running past overhead:

_Ah, good; the assault is going as planned._

Second thought, somewhat less important:

_Why can’t I feel my legs?_

Veers cranes his neck, realizes a moment later that the snow has been muffling his sense of hearing. The dreamlike quality of his vision fades; the crash was real, the snowspeeder barreling toward his viewport was real, this pain is absolutely _undeniably_ real. Sound crushes in around him all at once: the high-pitched whine of blasters weasels its way into his head like the start of a migraine, and beyond that there’s the crunch of AT-AT treads against Rebel snowspeeders (and bones), and the piercing shout of human voices here and there, pitched into the wind.

Blood trickles down the side of his face, pools in his ear, drips out again as he manages to lift his head. His own torso obscures his view of his legs, feels disconnected to him somehow, even though he can feel his chest shuddering as he gasps for breath. He grits his teeth, blinks something (sweat, blood, melted snow) out of his eyes but can’t quite manage to sit up. The best he gets is a glimpse of his boots.

And one of them is _definitely_ pointing the wrong way. His brain is pounding against the inside of his skull, and it’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly which foot is turned the wrong way round — but well, _one_ of them is (and maybe his hips are, too), and that’s all that matters. The backwards foot, not the backwards hips. He can think about backwards hips later, when he’s less concussed and capable of telling which way his body is facing.

He lets his head fall back. Breath hisses out between his teeth, visible in the frigid Hoth air. He feels himself shivering uncontrollably — cold or shock, doesn’t matter much — as medics catch sight of him, shout to each other, run toward him across the snow. He huffs out a breath, a gasp of pain, and feels his lips twitch up into the sort of dry smile that several of his colleagues would like to smack off his face.

They’d better get here fast, he thinks as the medics hurry toward him. If he’s crushed by one of his own walkers, Piett will never let him hear the end of it.

* * *

He wakes — because of course he does — with a steel cage around his balls, and it isn’t the _fun_ kind of steel cage. Even if he didn’t have red bacta gel cascading down around him, he’d know it wasn’t the fun kind. His eyes widen (this gel is _not_ warm) and his breath hitches through the respirator tube, and on the other side of the transparisteel, he can see Piett watching him with tight-lipped disapproval.

Or maybe it’s concern. Veers slips into unconsciousness again too quickly to determine which is true. 

Who let Piett into the infirmary anyway? he wonders as everything goes black. Doesn’t he have better things to do? 

He remembers the promotion a moment before he goes completely comatose and thinks: _ah, right._

_Admirals and laziness go hand-in-hand._

* * *

Piett’s a master of the bland face. He looks so unassuming (and pasty, and frankly somewhat nauseated) that nobody looks at him twice. Even after his promotion to admiral, it’s common to hear his name spoken with pity, or with the sort of lurid glee-masquerading-as-pity that was so typical of an Imperial Star Destroyer. ‘Lucked into it,’ is a common phrase used when discussing Piett. Typically this is followed by: ‘Did you see the holo? Lieutenant Oorski’s got a copy. You should’ve seen Piett’s face when Ozzel grabbed his tunic.’

Piett’s seen the holo. So has Veers. His expression is flawless; as Ozzel writhes, Piett looks like a man scared out of his skin, but keeping a proper Imperial veneer of control over his face. It’s good acting; when Ozzel reaches out blindly, sputtering and choking, and his meaty hand closes on Piett’s tunic, searching for help — Piett’s face spasms, looks almost like a man suppressing his pity, or a desire to reach out and help as Ozzel so clearly wants.

In reality, he was suppressing disgust. He’d just ironed that tunic. 

(And he’d done it by hand, too, not by droid. Leave it to Ozzel to mess that up for him.) 

Now he has the same bland look on his face, giving nothing away, as he watches Veers test out his new prosthetics. The synthflesh matches Veers’s skin tone perfectly, but he walks like a protocol droid, joints clunky and unpracticed. He marches around Piett once, twice, his jaw set in an expression that looks blank to the medical droids, but practically screams hurt vanity to Piett.

“Graceful,” Piett comments as Veers makes his third loop. He pauses, lights one of his noxious Outer Rim cigars. A medical droid rolls toward him, but Piett deactivates it with a sharp jab of the finger before it can reprimand him, and the other droids inch away in response. 

“You hide your envy well, Admiral,” Veers says with crisp dignity, starting a fourth loop.

“Envy?” says Piett, one eyebrow raised. Veers comes to a stop in front of him, glances down at Piett, makes a big show of looking up and down Piett’s body — legs crossed, the puffy jodhpurs doing nothing to hide his diminutive form — and then down at his own cybernetic legs.

“I think I’ve got another ten centimeters on you now,” he says.

Piett’s eyes go flat. He blows cigar smoke Veers’s way and shows absolutely no vexation whatsoever when the cloud dissipates before it reaches Veers’s face. “Makes you a better target,” he says.

Veers cracks at that, rewards Piett with the tiniest, driest of smiles before he turns and starts another loop. He’ll have his stumps worn down to bloody little nibs before this is over, Piett thinks, but there’s no real concern hidden behind this thought; Veers knows how to take care of himself.

He drags on his cigar again, thinks of Hoth, of Ozzel, the video he and Veers reviewed together when the other man was barely out of the bacta and still unable to speak. He can remember Veers’s blank face, one eye swollen shut and the other fixed on the holoprojector, watching the footage over and over again. They haven’t had time to discuss it yet; not with Vader still aboard.

Soon, though. 

Once Veers is done torturing them both with these new legs.

* * *

A change of air pressure in his quarters means that someone has opened the door. A shift of weight on his mattress a moment later means someone has sat on his bed.

A jolt of agony across his stump means Piett has oh-so-lovingly jabbed his thumbnail into Veers’s leg.

“Bastard,” Veers hisses as he opens his eyes, his voice still thick from sleep. The lights are off, but he can tell Piett’s not wearing his tunic — must have taken it off and discarded it as soon as he entered the room. The fact that he’s here at all means only one thing, and Veers sags back against his mattress, more relaxed than relieved. “Vader’s gone?” he asks.

“Left an hour ago,” Piett confirms. He reeks of cigar smoke and rum, but then again, this is Piett, and Veers would be worried if he didn’t reek of one of the two. He scoots over against the wall, gives Piett more room to join him, but all Piett does is thump his fingers against Veers’s injured leg again. “Aren’t you supposed to take these off when you go to bed?” he asks.

Veers twitches his leg — and the prosthetic attached to it — out of Piett’s reach. “You know it’s not the synthflesh you’re stabbing at with your ragged bridge-duty fingernails?” he snapped. 

“Oh, take a stim if it bothers you so much.” Piett lies down next to him, still mostly dressed. He scans Veers’s face, his expression bland — and, aware that he’s being studied, Veers schools his own expression into one of Imperial professionalism, despite the fact that he is currently chest-to-chest with his (shudder) _admiral_ , and wearing nothing but his undershorts.

Something changes in the air between them — becomes softer and more serious at the same time.

“So,” says Veers.

Piett raises an eyebrow.

“We aren’t dead,” Veers observes, raising an eyebrow in turn. “I assume the plan went off without a hitch?”

Piett half-turns, indicates his tunic where it hangs over Veers’s desk chair. “You _did_ see the admiral rank plaque, yes?”

Weaselly bastard.

“All’s well as it can be on the Executor,” says Piett, relenting somewhat at the expression on Veers’s face. His hand ghosts over Veers’s hip, deliberately steering close to his still-healing wounds. “Couldn’t have pulled it off without you, of course. Taking out Ozzel was one thing — and quite well-executed too, I might add—”

Of course he might.

“—but if the assault on Hoth had failed, I’d be in the incinerator right next to him,” said Piett. He said it with a glibness that implied he was flattering Veers, at least somewhat — but what did Veers care? In essence, it was true, and he didn’t need Piett to tell him how much the victory at Hoth had accomplished for the Empire. He shifted closer, so their noses were almost touching, waiting to see the moment Piett’s bland face dropped into something more serious.

He liked to see Piett flustered. He liked to see him incapable of feigning blankness. Slyly, Veers dragged his fingers up Piett’s side, beneath his undershirt, teasing him with the slightest of touches. He rocked his hips a little, felt Piett’s thigh against his own, slipped his leg between Piett’s—

Well, his prosthetic leg, that is. His prosthetic leg, which gave an audible whirr of the servomotors as Veers moved it.

Piett’s expression cracked, not flustered, just amused.

“This is all your fault,” Veers said, his servomotors still giving off a mechanical whine. Piett shrugged, dragged him closer.

“Always wanted to try fucking a droid,” he said, muffling the words with a patronizing kiss to the top of Veers’s head.

He really was a bastard, Veers decided. 


End file.
